Thérèse refuses to join the plot to assassinate Monsieur

Thérèse refuses to join the plot to assassinate Monsieur when Dubois offers her a chance to escape through murder and theft. The confrontation turns on a distinction Thérèse will not surrender: even a guilty man’s crimes do not authorize private individuals to execute justice. Her answer preserves her principles at the cost of safety, sharpening the novel’s contrast between a vulnerable woman’s refusal to commit crime and the protection enjoyed by powerful offenders.

The Proposal and Its Stakes

Dubois presents the scheme while the two women are travelling toward Monsieur’s country house, where he lives in isolation and holds parties. She describes the household as lightly guarded: Monsieur is accompanied by a valet, and a man riding ahead of their coach is part of the proposed operation. Dubois would seize the saber Monsieur uses to kill his victims; Thérèse is to hold him while Dubois kills him, and their accomplice is to deal with the valet.

The scheme has a material prize as well as a promise of survival. Dubois claims that more than eight hundred thousand francs are hidden in the house. She frames the choice starkly, offering an alliance as the alternative to death, and warns that if Thérèse exposes her plan she will accuse Thérèse of devising it. The offer thus combines a proposed murder, a robbery, a threat of betrayal, and an attempt to make Thérèse complicit in Dubois’s escape.

Thérèse’s Refusal

Dubois argues that Monsieur is a villain who murders a girl every day and that killing him would assist the law by punishing a man who deserves it. Thérèse rejects the justification rather than disputing the accusation. She answers that Dubois is proposing the killing for her own criminal purpose, not from a genuine wish to punish wrongdoing; even if revenge for the victims were the motive, Thérèse says, committing the act would still be wrong.

Her reasoning rests on a boundary between condemning crime and taking the law into one’s own hands. The responsibility for punishing the guilty belongs to the law, she says, not to private people. The answer directly resists Dubois’s effort to recast murder as justice and refuses to let the target’s guilt erase the nature of the proposed act. It is an ethical choice made under explicit pressure, not an abstract discussion detached from danger.

Threat and Interruption

Dubois responds to the refusal by declaring that Thérèse will die and that there is no point in hoping to escape her fate. Thérèse answers calmly that death holds no terror for her and describes it as a final rest from the miseries she has endured. Dubois then attacks her, but releases her when Thérèse cries out, fearing that the postilion might hear.

The immediate danger continues when the coach stops to change horses. Dubois raises her weapon and holds it against Thérèse’s heart. Before the plan can proceed, however, six horsemen catch up with the carriage and force it to stop. They are constables, and their arrival interrupts the confrontation. They identify Thérèse as resembling the woman wanted for the previous day’s fire at the principal hotel in Villefranche, and ask Dubois to surrender her. The arrest turns the attempted conspiracy into a new crisis for Thérèse: she has refused Dubois’s plan, yet is still in the company of a wanted criminal and is herself suspected of another offense.

Recurring Conflict and Significance

The choice belongs to a larger pattern in Thérèse’s story, where an honest act or refusal does not reliably secure her from punishment. Earlier, Monsieur du Harpin planted a diamond in her mattress and used the discovery to have her arrested after she refused his advances. At her trial, her poverty and lack of protection counted against her; her attempt to expose his revenge was dismissed, and she was sent to the Conciergerie. The later encounter with Dubois therefore repeats the same structural danger in a different form: Thérèse’s refusal to participate in wrongdoing leaves her vulnerable to people who can manipulate accusation and force.

The episode also places Dubois’s account of organized exploitation beside Thérèse’s insistence on individual restraint. Elsewhere, Dubois describes using influence over economic conditions to deepen poverty and enlarge the pool of people she can ensnare. In the country-house proposal, she again treats other people’s lives as expendable means—first the valet’s, then Thérèse’s if she will not cooperate. Thérèse’s refusal does not undo the wider injustices or guarantee her safety; the constables’ intervention brings immediate interruption, not a resolution of her precarious position. The scene’s force lies in that imbalance: Dubois can make crime sound like justice, while Thérèse maintains that the means remain criminal even when the intended victim is guilty.